Chef Bot? Robot Learns Cooking from YouTube Videos

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The U.S. military may not be known for its haute cuisine, but
it's developing a new robot that can learn how to cook from
watching YouTube videos.

Using its brainy programming, the robot is capable
of recognizing how kitchen utensils are used in the videos, and
can accurately replicate those actions without human
intervention, according to the study, which was funded by the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

It's not entirely clear why the Army has an interest in robots
that can cook, but cooking requires a wide variety of actions
that future service robots will need to learn, said researchers
at the University of Maryland, College Park, who led the study.
[ Humanoid
Robots to Flying Cars: 10 Coolest DARPA Projects ]

The agency has now "taken the next step" by developing a robot
that processes visual information and translates it into actions,
Reza Ghanadan, a program manager in DARPA's Defense Sciences
Offices, said
in a statement.

The team trained the robot by using a database of YouTube cooking
videos shot from a third-person perspective. At one level, the
robot's "brain" was powered by two learning algorithms, or neural
networks: one system for recognizing objects, and one for
classifying the type of grip used to handle the object. At a
higher level, the robot's software allowed it to use its
knowledge to mimic the actions in the videos.

The robot was able to teach itself to follow the cooking videos
with a high degree of accuracy, correctly recognizing objects 79
percent of the time, accurately recognizing the way objects were
grasped 91 percent of the time, and predicting the correct
actions 83 percent of the time, according to DARPA.

In addition, the robot could also remember some of what it
learned — for example, which grip type was used with a particular
object — and could potentially share that knowledge with other
robots, Ghanadan said. "This learning-based approach is a
significant step towards developing technologies that could have
benefits in areas such as military repair and logistics," she
added.

The
research was presented Jan. 29 at the 29th meeting of the
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.